The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

20 NOVEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The deputy chief of mission should also be the chief operating officer of the embassy. Welcome, Consular Adjudicators Create a new consular adjudicator/ interviewer specialty to enable removal of the consular tour requirement for officers and to improve consular services, perfor- mance and consistency. These positions would have five-year assignments and would alternate between overseas and domestic to support domestic consular operations. The assignments for these positions would be based on foreign language skills. For example, someone with Spanish-lan- guage fluency might serve in Mexico City, then back in the United States, and then in Bogotá to maximize the department’s investment in foreign language education and also the individual officer’s skill set in language nuances and local cultures. What Do You Really Think Of Me? Modify the annual Employee Evalua- tion Report in two ways: First , add three boxes that each man- ager checks: a. Ready to Promote b. Ready to Promote with Conditions (spelled out in Manager Statement) c. Not Ready to Promote Second , in place of a rater and reviewer statement, have a rater/manager state- ment, a peer statement and an employee statement. The selection of the peer/ employee should be unique per year and per tour; in other words, the officer has to use a different peer and different employee for each EER. While not a full 360-degree evaluation, this system captures a more accurate pic- ture of the employee’s accomplishments than the current practice of providing bullet points to a reviewer with whom the employee may only rarely interact. A Better MED It has become increasingly difficult to hire competent medical professionals into the Foreign Service because of the differ- ence between private-sector compensa- tion and what the department offers. Other government agencies, such as the Veterans Administration, have overcome this by developing specialized pay scales specific to the respective profession/posi- tion. The Bureau of Medical Services and department management should develop a separate pay scale for regional medical officer, regional medical officer/psychia- trist and other MED professions to better recruit and retain talented practitioners in those fields. One World The State geographic bureaus should be aligned with the Department of Defense’s Regional Combatant Com- mands to better coordinate support and missions. This would split the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs into South Ameri- can Affairs and North American Affairs (which would also oversee domestic operations), transfer most of North Africa into the Bureau of African Affairs and combine parts of the bureaus of Near Eastern Affairs and South and Central Asian Affairs to form a new Bureau of Asia Pacific Affairs. This would change which bureaus some embassies would fall under, but would not require the closure of any over- seas facilities. Home or Abroad? Move as many regional bureau Civil Service positions as appropriate overseas to centralized regional support hubs to better provide real-time support to embassy operations. This may be Nairobi for AF, for example, or Bangkok for EAP. These positions could be staffed at five- year intervals, similar to how other agen- cies announce and advertise for overseas positions (e.g., the Drug Enforcement Administration). A good litmus test for whether a posi- tion should be offshored would be to evaluate howmuch required HST/D.C. interaction that position involves by comparison with the provision of services directly to posts; if the scale tips more to the latter, then the position should go overseas. This would also free up head- quarters space to allow for consolidation of some offices back into Main State and reduce our Washington, D.C., footprint. No More Bait and Switch An assignment to an overseas mis- sion should be a contract between the employee and the department, yet the State Department retains unilateral authority to reduce the compensation accorded to that employee. The Hardship Allowance, Cost of Liv- ing Adjustment, Danger Pay Allowance and number of R&Rs should be locked in as a floor based on the panel date of the employee. These benefits can increase during the officer’s tour, but they should not be reduced below the amount at the time of paneling. This will create more financial stability for the officer, as well as stability for per- sonnel budgeting.